IN THE MORNING, THE PHONE RANG WITH THE RESULTS OF MY blood test: I was seven weeks along. I said, “That’s truly impossible,” with a wave of relief—clearly they had the wrong results!—until the person explained that they count the two weeks before conception. I said, “So really it’s only five weeks,” and she said, “In a way, but officially, you’re seven weeks pregnant.” I said, “None of this makes any fucking sense,” and hung up. That evening, the phone rang and at the sound of Ryan’s voice my skin seemed to turn inside out. I pictured him on a sagging couch in the studio’s break room. Or at a corner pay phone in the mild dry Austin evening, his arms bare in a T-shirt.
“What’s up?” I said. My voice curdled; I cleared my throat.
“I’m back.”
“What?” The receiver grew slippery in my hand. I glanced at the kitchen. Summer had paused the hand mixer and was carefully scraping down a mixing bowl, ear turned toward the living room. He wasn’t due back for five more days. “Did you finish early?”
“You could say that. Let’s get a drink.”
My mouth had gone dry. “I can’t. I have family dinner at Robin and Topher’s, and then there’s some house show by Division. Is everything all right?”
“You sound weird.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “I have to go. Why are you back early?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine,” I said. “Good-bye.”
He hung up.
A minute later the phone rang again. “Just come over,” he said. It was unlike him to plead. “Have a drink with me. One round of Scrabble.”
“I told you, I have to go to family dinner.”
“Oh.” He sighed. “Never mind.”
“Are you okay?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
We hung up. I called him back.
“Hey. I’ll come by for a minute. But I can’t stay long.”
As I pulled on my coat Summer leaned out of the kitchen and asked whom I’d been talking to and I said it was Ted. I said I’d broken something at the shop—which was in fact true, I’d knocked over a sixty-dollar Blenko vase, there went the day’s wages—and I’d meet her at dinner after I’d taken care of it.
Every parking space on Ryan’s block was taken. I circled until I found one across the street from that shadowy doorway where we’d first kissed. If only I’d gone straight home from La Luna that night. If only I had grabbed an extra beer from backstage and not bothered heading over to the bar. If only someone had already taken that bar stool beside him, or I’d left a minute later and worked my way through some other opening in the crowd. If only I’d not seen Flynn and Vivian and could have coasted along in cozy ignorance for just another night. If only I hadn’t gone to the show at all, and had lingered in my den of crowd-shy sorrow a day or two longer. I rewound, replayed, rechose my own adventure. To think that if I had made one minor different move on the night it all started—that a mere minute could have sealed off this long, unfathomable tunnel I had fallen into—I never would have even known it could exist. There were a hundred ways to delete one minute of that night so that now I would be headed guilelessly to family dinner with no secrets and no in utero guest and no idea what it was like to fuck a man, an entirely other Andrea, the Andrea I wanted to believe I was, and the Andrea everyone still thought I had been all along. To undo the months that followed was far more complicated. At a certain point, you can’t blame chance. Only yourself.
I walked slowly enough that my hair was soaked by the time I reached his front door. I let myself in.
The apartment was warm and the familiarity of the scent jolted me. It smelled like a period in my life, already taking on retrospect. Ryan had lived there two years and still it looked temporary, with its white walls, that plain little Danish sofa, the lone shelf of records and CDs, the stereo stacked on a side table, one rug at the entryway, a thrift-store painting of a horse above the sofa.
Ryan slouched on the couch with his repaired guitar, plucking out a countermelody to the record playing on the stereo. A suitcase lay open on the floor, half-emptied. He had showered and shaved—his hair was still damp—and dark circles shadowed his eyes. “Hello, you,” he said, and started to lift off the guitar.
“Don’t get up, it’s okay,” I said, shrugging off my jacket and kicking off my wet shoes. “What are you playing?”
He strummed a terse flourish. “A little song called ‘We Broke Up.’”
I wasn’t sure how to take that. “Is that what we did?”
“It’s not about you.” Ryan hit a low sour chord and set the guitar aside. “The fucking band.”
“You broke up?” I stopped. “The Cold Shoulder broke up?”
Ryan rubbed his hand across his face. “I’m so tired,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. I couldn’t help it, I hugged him, and he hugged back. His gray sweater was soft and worn thin. I could see the black T-shirt underneath. His head dropped to rest on mine for a moment.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Want a drink?” he said.
I did, desperately. But I could not bring myself to do it. Tuesday, I told myself. I’ll drink Tuesday. A lot. I pulled away. “Water’s fine. What about the new record?”
“The record.” He opened the fridge and peered inside as if it contained a distant view. “The record. Is four songs long.”
They had fought in the studio: with each other, with the engineer, with the songs. Ryan cut short my dismay. “It’s okay,” he said curtly, setting two glasses down on the counter with a thunk. “It always happens. Bands have life spans. They don’t last forever. There will be others.”
“But you loved the Cold Shoulder.”
“Jesse wanted out. He wants his own deal. I think he thinks he can be the next Elliott.” Ryan gave the ice tray a sharp twist and the cubes popped loose, a sound like joints cracking.
“What about the songs you recorded?”
“Either we’ll make a posthumous EP out of it or they’ll just be the Great Lost Recordings. The record label’s going under too. Mercury bled them dry.” It was happening more and more these days: the vampiric deals the majors had struck with the small indies were collapsing. It was bad enough to see your homegrown culture stolen and sold back to you in facsimile at the mall. Even worse when the original pillars of it then started to crack. Story of the decade. The nineties could break your heart.
He allowed my sympathy but it seemed not to touch him. He handled it all like a journalist, detached, merely reporting, and focused on pouring the water into my glass as if measuring it precisely. He said, “At least the band went out on a high note. We never stuck around long enough to get bad.”
“You got to have only the good part,” I said.
“Yeah. Story of my life, right?” His laugh was light and bitter as beer. “Speaking of. Here you are.”
“I’m definitely not the good part.” My voice caught in my throat.
He asked what I meant. I said, “You don’t want to know,” but then of course he did, and I wasn’t prepared to talk my way out of it.
My hands slid deep into the pocket of my sweatshirt and met over my abdomen. I took a deep breath.
Ryan’s face when I said those two words: realization, then narrowed eyes, then fear, and then he turned away and walked to the stereo, where the record had spun out and the needle circled, thk . . . thk . . . thk . . .
He knelt. “Fuck,” he said with each precise move—“fuck,” resting the player arm in its cradle; “fuck,” a gentle snap of the wrist to settle the record in its sleeve; “fuck,” easing it into the cover; “fuck,” done. He shelved the record and sat back on his heels, his back turned to me. “What next?”
“The obvious,” I said.
“I’ll pay for it.”
“They have a sliding scale,” I said. “I can do it.”
“No, let me help. Fuck. You probably hate me now.”
“Why would I hate you? It’s not like it’s your fault. Unless there’s something I don’t know. Should I?”
“No! I was careful. We were both careful. Weren’t we?”
“Well, I slept with someone who could get me pregnant, so that’s on me. That was optional, and I did it.”
“That’s me. I’m always optional, aren’t I?”
I said I didn’t mean it to sound like that and he said well it did. I said, “Wasn’t I just as optional to you?”
“Clearly you think so,” he said.
I raised my hands. “I can’t fight about this right now. I have to go to dinner.”
“Just tell me when your appointment is,” he said, “and I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, but I can do this on my own. I’ll be fine.”
“That’s what you think,” he said. “You shouldn’t go there alone.”
I pulled my hands deep into my sleeves. What did I know about Ryan after all? I knew his body, I could name all the places he’d lived and all the bands he had played in, I knew selected stories; I knew from his guitar that he could, on impulse, destroy something he loved. I knew he liked to have space. It was one of the reasons we had worked: I gave him infinite space, and he gave me easy doses of affection. So it seemed. But I had never wanted to talk about the girls I’d been with—I had to hold in reserve some queer part of myself—so I had never asked him about his. Now I wanted to ask, You’ve been there?, but held back. If he had, it wasn’t my business. And if he had, wasn’t I just another one—an ordinary girl, and biologically stuck with it?
I tried to suppress a shiver as I zipped up my damp jacket.
“You’re leaving now? After that?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry about your band, and I’m so sorry I messed up your life, and I’m sorry I got . . . pregnant, and now I have to go pick up a giant bottle of bourbon to bring to dinner.”
“Of course. The family. I suppose they all know already?”
“Hell no. You’re the only one I’ve told.”
“Are you going to tell them now?”
“It’s not my plan.”
“You’ll never tell them, will you,” he said. “As if all this never happened.”
“It’s not like that, Ryan.”
“It did happen,” he said. “You can try to forget it if you want, but in real life, all of this happened. I was real.”
I couldn’t bear the look in his eyes. “I know,” I said.
“Were you even going to tell me?”
One last lie. “Yes.”
I left.
Robin and Topher and Marisol lived in a house known as the Spawn, a lightly haunted, peeling pink Victorian on Southeast Salmon Street, not quite far enough away for me to fully compose myself en route. I opened the door agitated and shivering, whiskey in hand, and Topher caught me in the entry with his Polaroid camera and a bright flash.
He greeted everyone like this, laying out the Polaroids on the coffee table to cure. Our faces emerged from ghostly to glowing. Summer’s cherry-red hair betrayed half an inch of dim roots but she was an expert at assuming a pose; when the lens turned to her she snapped right into a coy vamp, finger on glossy lip, until the click of the shutter released her immediately back into whatever she’d been doing. Marcy allowed a resigned smirk—You kids, her face said, even as she kept hanging out with us. Squinting Lawrence wore a Boy Scout shirt with too-short sleeves rolled above the elbow. Robin tilted forward in her pleather jacket, a long wavy strand of hair trickling over her shoulder, the glint of her labret piercing a hot little star in the flash. The flash gleamed off the pink dining room wall and Meena’s narrow glasses. Marisol was twenty-two but looked sixteen, with her plush cheeks and knee socks. In my picture, I was saying No! and reaching for the camera, eyes wide, lips round, hand a blown-out blur in the foreground, a moment too late. This would be me that night—both reaching out and begging no.
Family dinner was Southern-themed, and they’d turned the heat up to the seventies, “for authenticity.” The tangy musk of barbecue sauce and humid sweetness of hot corn bread overrode the usual whiff of cat litter.
When no one was looking I fixed myself a whiskey ginger that was secretly all ginger and prowled the kitchen, tasting everything until we could finally eat. My hunger astonished me. I loaded up biscuits with barbecued seitan and sweet pickles. My mouth watered, pooled. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the serving dishes, a jolt of hoarder’s panic every time someone forked off another slice of seitan. The greens, on the other hand, tasted bitter and sick to me. All I wanted was to drench everything in sight in that barbecue sauce. I offered to take the used dishes into the kitchen, just so I could devour everyone else’s last abandoned bites. Meena came in and caught me licking my plate.
“Girl, your nose,” she said, and I reached up and swiped off a smear of sauce. “What’s up with you?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t even know how to answer that.”
Then Robin came into the kitchen and told us to clear out. “No cleanup yet! There’s pie.”
“Pie!” I set down the plate. “We can help with that.”
“Wait, what did you mean by that?” Meena said as we headed back to the dining room with dessert plates.
“Pie? We’ll eat the hell out of it.”
“No, what’s going on with you,” she said, but by then we were back in the dining room and I waved it off.
“Nothing.”
As inconspicuously as I could, I polished off two wedges of peach ginger pie, buttery and rich, oozing with orange flesh and thick syrup, and finished Lawrence’s half-abandoned slice of chess pie, a sticky, sickly thing I’d never heard of before and found visually repulsive but couldn’t stop eating anyway. I looked around the table at my friends, my family, to see if they noticed, and realized I knew the details of their faces so well I could draw any one of them without looking. I imagined being brought up among these people, what a weird good world that would be.
“Smoke?” Topher extended a pack toward me.
While I’d faked my way through my whiskey-less ginger, everyone else had hit the booze generously, and now they pulled out cigarettes and started to light up.
I said, “I thought you guys didn’t smoke inside.”
He said, “It’s okay, it’s family dinner. And it’s pouring out there. Light on up.”
Summer set her elbows on the table, blew two perfect smoke rings, and raised her glass. “You guys, I have good news.”
What would smoke do? I tried to summon the information from eighth-grade health. Drinking was bad, smoking was bad, what about secondhand smoke? Something about birth weight? How much did it take? Why did I care? “Can we open a window?” I said.
Summer gave me an annoyed glance.
Robin raised the dining room window an inch. “Is that enough? It’s chilly out there.”
I said, “Maybe I can switch seats with Lawrence.” She sat closest to the window.
“Okay.” Lawrence got up.
“What’s up?” Meena said. “Andy’s acting bizarre.”
“Nothing’s up.” I slid into Lawrence’s seat. “Go ahead, Summer.”
“Look at her face!” Meena said.
I pretended to wipe my mouth as I took a deep filtered breath through my napkin.
Summer looked from Meena’s bemused smirk to my half-masked face. “Is this about your mono situation?”
“You have mono?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “I don’t have mono. I’m fine. Come on, Summer has news.”
“What was it then?” Summer said. “Did you go to the doctor yet? Are you contagious?”
“The doctor?”
“Spill it, Andy.”
Everyone looked at me. I couldn’t speak.
Six faces on me. I had to come up with something. Think, think, I thought.
Over the course of the Ryan affair I had trained myself to practice having a thought—I would come up with an acceptable thought to be having, and then set it aside in reserve while I delved into my real, inappropriate thoughts about my secret. Then if someone asked what I was daydreaming about I could grab the stored thought and present it. This cringey poster I’m supposed to make. That review of our art show in the Willamette Week. This one thing I read about hyenas. How when I was twelve a wood thrush hit the living room window and I stored its body in the laundry room freezer for a week.
But they’d caught me now with nothing—only the truth came to mind. My heart began to beat so hard I felt it in my ears and eyes. “I can’t talk about it,” I said. “Another time.”
Now concern set in. Was I sick? No, I said, not really. Had something happened to me? I looked traumatized. What the fuck happened?
To my dismay, tears came to my eyes. I hid my crumpling mouth behind my hand and begged my body to stop betraying me. I knew one rip could take out a whole net, and all the fish would swim out just like that.
“What the fuck? Oh my god, Andy, were you hurt?” Meena’s eyes brightened with fear.
“No, it’s not that at all. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I said as tears streamed down my cheeks. They had backed me into a cul-de-sac of concern. I had no way out.
I said, “I’m pregnant.”
A moment as they all silently translated the word. Meena looked like she’d been shot.
“You’re fucking with us,” said Marcy.
“I wish.”
“How the fuck—”
“Were you assaulted?” said Robin.
“No, I wasn’t assaulted,” I said. I silently struggled to formulate a plausible case for immaculate conception.
But Meena was already white-knuckling her fork, eyes narrowed. “If you’re about to say what I think you’re going to say—frankly, I would almost rather hear that you’d been roofied.”
“Meena!” spat Robin.
“Whoa,” Lawrence said.
“Oh my god,” I said, “can we appreciate the fact that I’m unmolested, even if it means I did the unthinkable?”
“Hold on now.” Summer swept her hands above the table as if spreading a tablecloth, and brought them down with a hard smack. “You fucked a man?” she said with an incredulous smile. “Super-lesbian Andrea?”
Topher mimed falling out of his chair, then took it all the way and puddled at Robin’s feet. Robin reached down and petted his forehead. Marisol watched us all like we were a movie, eyes wide.
“Not only did you fuck a man, you got pregnant?” Robin said.
“How did you even do that?” marveled Marcy, a mix of disgust and awe in her voice.
“I can’t even believe you would do that,” Meena said. “And look where it got you.”
“Forgive me, Father, I have sinned,” I muttered.
“It’s not funny. Who the hell is this cock-toter? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Hey now,” Topher grunted from the floor.
“Why didn’t you tell any of us?”
“Especially me, your housemate, who this would especially affect. I mean, you were the first person I told my news. Which I guess we’ve all completely forgotten about now.”
“Please tell your news,” I said. “I beg you.”
“What is it?”
“Wait, we’ll get to it. We have to deal with this.”
“I didn’t tell you because I was going to just take care of it,” I said. “And because of this. Because this is what happens. Now everyone’s upset, and I feel even more fucked up about it, which I didn’t think was possible.”
“I’m upset because I care,” Meena said.
“Yeah, that was my parents’ line too.”
Topher’s face emerged above the table. “Back up, back up, back up.” He pulled himself into his seat. “Who is the dude? How did we get here?”
I told them the barest skeleton of the truth, but it was clear the lie stretched back months. I could see them all rewinding, pausing, replaying. Even while we . . . As clearly as if subtitles scrolled across their foreheads, I saw them thinking, Who are you?
If someone would just say it, I would answer, You know who I am. You are who I am. But what if they no longer believed me? I felt gelatinized with panic.
“This guy Ryan,” I said, and Summer said, “The one who gives you ‘drum lessons’? The one who ‘cuts your hair’?”
“For the record, those were not actually euphemisms.”
“That guy? Is your inseminator?” Meena said.
“We’re not in a hog unit.”
“You mated.”
“Oh my god, please, stop. Look, it was just an affair. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. He was just, like, a friend with benefits. I was on the rebound.”
“That’s a hell of a rebound.” Marcy was leaning back in her seat, swigging from a bottle she held loosely around the neck.
“Well, I hope it never happens again, because I’m really not comfortable with dudes around,” said Meena.
“You work with dudes,” I said. “You play shows with bands with dudes in them.”
“That’s work. This is life.”
“What about Topher?” said Lawrence.
“I’m more masculine than Topher,” Meena said.
Topher looked wounded and I hit Meena’s arm. She said, “Did you just hit me?” but Robin overrode her with, “It’s not about masculinity. Topher is othered too, and he’s conscious of his male privilege.”
They looked at me pointedly. “Okay,” I said, “so is Ryan.”
“Really. He’s white and straight. Like, how in touch with his male privilege is this guy?”
“He’s vegetarian,” I fumbled. Groans all around. “He speaks Spanish better than I do.” Admittedly a sore spot for me.
“I speak Spanish better than you do,” Meena muttered.
Marisol swatted her shoulder. “Cállate. That’s not fair.”
“I don’t know, he’s really pretty good, I’ve never heard him say sexist shit. He was raised by a single mom?”
“Oh, Andy. Are you out of your mind?” Robin said. “Have you been away from straight men for so long that you’ve forgotten what they’re really like?”
Summer returned to the table with what appeared to be a pint glass full of bourbon. “No, this is exactly the problem—she has been with one. She’s been acclimated.”
“A, I’m done with him,” I said. “And B, Summer, what about all the men you get up on every day? Is that a problem too?”
Summer snapped, “It is not the same, and you know it. I do it for money. I do it to make a living. And I don’t fuck them.”
“Andy, what about those girls you went out with? Did they know?” Meena asked.
“Men spread disease,” said Robin.
Topher looked offended. “Excuse me?”
“Lesbians get STDs too,” young Marisol, well trained, countered earnestly.
“Not from each other!” Meena said, recoiling. “And if they do, it’s because one of them was either with a guy or slept with someone else who was. There’s always a penis at the root.”
Summer made a gagging face. “Please never say that phrase again.”
“Gold star until I die,” Meena said, and Marcy raised her bottle.
“Andy is clearly insane, but also, fuck all y’all and your gold stars,” Summer said. “We don’t always choose.” Apologies rose around the table but she shook Marcy’s hand off her forearm and said, “No. Enough.”
“I did have the choice,” I said. “I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I just wanted to mess around with someone who definitely, for once, had no chance of fucking any of my friends. And maybe I didn’t tell because I didn’t want to be judged by the Lesbian Mafia.”
“You are the Lesbian Mafia.”
“Not for long, I bet,” I said.
“You’re still a lesbian,” Lawrence said. “Aren’t you?”
“Maybe you’re bisexual,” Meena hissed. We all winced. Bisexual was a word we seldom spoke outside of our initial coming-out phases. It was a beginner concept, for newbies and outsiders. You think it’s going to ease the shock, Vivian had warned me in college, but no. It just means that your mother will forever hold on to hope that you will one day come around and end up with a man. My mother. Stomach clench.
“I am not”—I funneled my voice into a vicious whisper—“that.” I couldn’t even say the word. It sounded so mechanical. Or like something under a microscope, squirming on a glass slide. It made me think of nematodes. We knew girls who were bisexual. Or whatever. Girls who we thought were one of us who then went for a roll in the hay with a boy. Which was fine. We just didn’t necessarily want to know about it. Sometimes one would come to a lesbian party with her new . . . boyfriend, and you felt awkward for the guy standing there, being a good sport, and for the girl, knowing she must feel a little alienated among her own people, and you kind of hoped it would work out and kind of hoped it wouldn’t, and you just weren’t quite sure what to say.
Because to us bisexual was the earnest white girl in your women’s studies class who had a nice boyfriend and wanted to clock in a little more oppression. The Riot Grrrls who hated that they wanted boys and sometimes professed their girl-love physically, an extension of their politics more than their desire. Bisexual was the way celebrities avoided it, or faked it. Or couples in the bar or the classifieds who wanted a third. Or women who remained happily married or boyfriended to a guy who was okay with their getting with another woman, or who just felt emotionally open to the possibility, who thought they could get into it if they gave it a shot, like hot yoga.
“I’m a lesbian who experimented,” I said forcefully. “That’s all.”
“Maybe we should get back to Summer’s news,” Lawrence said timidly.
“It’s going to be hard to top this,” Topher said.
“Fine. I’m moving out,” Summer said, stamping her cigarette butt down hard on her pie plate.
“Because of the baby?”
“No! I didn’t even fucking know about a baby! I’m moving in with Marcy”—Summer flung a hand toward Marcy, who braced her with a hand on her back and a worried smile—“which was what I was about to tell you all. But we’ve been a little upstaged.”
“Well, I rather doubt there’s going to be a baby,” said Meena. “Andrea may be crazy but she’s not crazy.”
I was so tired of Meena knowing me into submission. “Oh, you think?” I said, purely to mess with her. “What if I did have it?”
“You can’t have it!” Meena said. “How would you even do that?”
“Of course she can have it,” said Marisol. “It’s her body.”
“You have no idea what I’m capable of,” I said.
“God, if you wanted to have a baby you should have just used Topher’s sperm,” Robin said. “You could have had a nice little gayby.”
Topher crossed his legs. “Don’t pimp me.”
“We could all name it,” Lawrence said. “And raise it without a gender.”
“Hell no,” Meena said. “It is ethically wrong to procreate. The planet is horribly overpopulated and human reproduction is destroying everything.”
“One baby’s not gonna ruin the earth,” said Marcy, who didn’t yet recognize the glassy fervid glint Meena would get in her eye when you bumped against one of her deeply held convictions.
“I’m dead serious. This is a moral and ethical imperative—”
“Meena has an interview at Nike.”
Everyone turned to Lawrence, who had been sitting on her hands, a frown deepening on her face. Then we all looked at Meena, who gave Lawrence a death glare. Lawrence cringed but shrugged.
“What?”
“Advertising?”
“Marketing?”
“Beaverton?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Meena said, “I need health insurance! I need a real job!”
“But Nike,” Robin said. “The worst sweatshops of all.”
Meena said, “I’m not going to give them any good ideas. I’m still going to do my own art on the side. I’m still going to do the band. I just, I need a real job.”
“What happened to ‘selling out’?”
Unnerved, Meena tried to redirect the searchlight back to me. “Oh, I’m selling out?” she said. “At least I didn’t secretly fuck a man.”
“Yeah, but you’re basically fucking the Man,” said Robin.
Meena and I both stood at the same time and said, “Fuck this.”
“This is rich,” Marcy said appreciatively. Finally she was getting her money’s worth.
Robin folded her napkin and said, “Well, then,” at the same time Topher pushed back his chair and said, wincing, “There’s more pie?”
No one wanted pie. Well, I did, rather desperately, but I didn’t want any commentary about eating for two. I offered to do the dishes, hoping to linger in order to defer the furious talk that would erupt behind my back if I left first, but Robin and Topher and Marisol refused to let any of us help. They wanted to leave for the house show; two bands from Oakland were playing, and Marisol knew one.
I hated to peel away from the group, leaving them to discuss me, but I couldn’t face a party. While they gathered the remaining alcohol and figured out who’d drive, I said good-bye, passed the coffee table strewn with Polaroids, and stepped outside.
The night had turned cold, clouds parted to reveal a sharp full moon, and I drew that first breath so deeply into my lungs it hurt. My secrets were gone. The Andrea I’d been was over. But instead of feeling that she’d died, I somehow felt wildly, recklessly alive. The wet sidewalk before me gleamed under the streetlights and I lengthened my strides down the block toward my car, charged with an inexplicable idea that I couldn’t quite believe I was having. Could I?
My headlights were on, dim and dying.
I stopped in my tracks. “Oh fuck,” I said. “Please. Please.” But sure enough, the car could not start. A whine, a click, silence.
Lawrence found me trudging up Southeast Twentieth, near the cemetery. She pulled up beside me in her blue Corolla wagon and waved me in.
I wished I could lone-wolf it and say, I’ll take the bus, or even tougher, I’ll walk. But my adrenaline had ebbed and fatigue had hit me full force. I got in. Cool air still blew from the vents. “Thanks,” I said. “Aren’t you going to the party?”
“Meena is trying to get with Marisol and I don’t really want to be around to watch.”
“Oh.” I blew on my cold fingers. “Are you into Marisol?”
Lawrence sighed. “She’s not really my type. I was just excited there was someone new in town.”
“Well, she got to see Meena at her most Meena tonight, so there’s the true test.”
“Oh my god, that dinner was so intense,” Lawrence said.
“Do you think she’ll forgive me? God, will anyone?”
“It was a shock, but honestly? I don’t think it’s that big a deal.” Lawrence lowered her voice. “You know, I gave a blow job once in high school.” She looked scandalized and amused by her own admission.
“We all know about your famous blow job, Lawrence. But it didn’t knock you up.” I looked at her. “Kind of nasty, aren’t they? I’d rather never do one again.”
Lawrence shuddered. “I am so glad I’m a lesbian.”
“Me too,” I said. “Mostly.”
“Mostly glad or mostly lesbian?”
I started to laugh and Lawrence did too. “Neither. Both. Oh my god, Lawrence, I’m fucking pregnant. That’s what I am. I think I’m a whole other gender now.”
“We can work with that.”
The car had warmed up by the time we turned up Twelfth Avenue. “Lawrence. What if—” The toasty aroma of baking bread wafted through the vents. I looked out the window. Above the Franz Bakery, a giant loaf of premium enriched white rotated lazily. How could something so mass-produced and processed smell so real and good? “What if I just went for it? I mean, this is never going to happen again. It’s like, here’s my chance.”
“How would you afford it?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Food stamps. Something. Maybe Summer can get me a dancing gig.”
“Let’s be honest, Andy, you can hardly touch your toes.”
“When you’re naked, you can get away with a lot. Or maybe Meena can get me a Nike job.”
Lawrence cringed. “She’s going to kill me.”
“She’ll get over it. Once she gets her first paycheck.”
We pulled up in front of my house. “Whatever you do,” Lawrence said, “I’m here for you. I mean it.”
I leaned across the stick shift and hugged her tight. She tolerated it for a moment and then writhed gently away. Before I shut the door, she said sternly, “But there’s one thing that’s not negotiable.” She looked troubled.
A shiver of dread. “What’s that?”
“That child had better respect cats.”
I solemnly swore.
That night in bed, I lay on my back and rested my hands on my abdomen. Of course it was far too early to feel anything. But I knew it was in there.
“You and me,” I whispered in the dark. Two selves. “Do you think we could do this?”